By Linda Poon, Image: Rise Home Stories, Bloomberg City Lab + Equality, January 12, 2022
The U.S. housing system containsa morass of hard-to-understand policies past and present that have delivered injustice to many Americans, particularly people of color. But there’s one simple theme that unites these policies: The narrative that the American dream of homeownership can be achieved by anyone through hard work and smart decision-making is a myth.
A new project created by housing and community advocates seeks to communicate this illusion of choice and opportunity in the housing system through a format particularly suited to the subject matter: a choose-your-own-adventure video game.
In “Dot’s Home,” players step into the shoes of Dorothea “Dot” Hawkins, a young Black woman living in her grandma’s house. The home, in a disinvested Black neighborhood in Detroit, is in desperate need of repairs. “Dot” travels back in time, via a magic key, to help her family make crucial housing decisions that will ultimately affect her own future. These decisions include whether her grandparents should invest in a shoddy house as their first home, and whether her parents should move away from their community to the suburbs after their home in a public housing development is set for demolition.
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